I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (27 page)

Dan turned to me. “So, you’re a tourist?” The ease with which I lied and said I was visiting family startled me.

“Some think tourism is a new kind of persecution,” he said. “On account of we don’t want our souls marketed.” We commented on the irony of this, the disguise of plainness they adopted way back when now making them glaringly obvious and strange.

“I don’t know,” Dan said. “We could never have stopped it. Now, we need it.”

The boys fell behind by a few runs after succumbing to
impulse in the field. They forced throws, overran balls, bypassed cutoff men. “Bah,” Dan went. “Playing young. In a hurry.”

I told him about this Rumspringa documentary I’d seen? Where, like, all the kids went to these huge parties? And had unprotected sex? And did, like, meth and stuff? And did that happen out here?

“We got problems just like anybody. Drugs, pregnancy. Some of that stuff’ll probably go on after this game is over. It’s being a child. But then that stops. Or it’s supposed to stop, if you make the right decision.

“You just feel silly after a while, running around. ‘Where am I going?’ Ya know?”

Giving no notice, I touched his shirt. I rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger, as though pantomiming the universal gesture for “very costly.”

He cocked his head and curled his lower lip under his upper. “You like it? My wife buys them in the store in town. She don’t wash by hand, just so you know. We’re not, what do you call—”

“Noble savages?” I offered.

“At the shop, I have a Gmail. Washes ’em in the pneumatic washer, my wife.”

When Aaron the left fielder walked to the plate with the score tied six all, the guys in the dugout hummed a ragged facsimile of “Here Comes the Bride.” The men in the bleachers stamped and hooted. One young lady in attendance put her face in her hands, wracked with either laughter or sobs. This, it turned out, was Aaron’s final at-bat before marriage, the last pitch he’d swing at.

I decided that I could not watch this. This was like sneaking into a bar mitzvah, or trying to peek through the fogged window of a car parked on an escarpment. This was a turning point I should not be privy to.

On the unlit diamond to the east, four Amish boys in slacks
and suspenders were playing pepper, a game where fielders crowd around a batter who slaps quick grounders into the array. I mumbled a hasty goodbye, fetched my glove, and joined them.

I gobbled up the first dozen balls hit my way. After each one bellied my pocket, I felt good, great, like a coin had been slotted and I could play myself a little longer. I whipped the ball back to the batter, who chopped it at someone else.

Then that good feeling vanished. It always vanishes, because it’s always contingent upon the next ball.

The boy off my forehand side fielded by reaching down with his one hand while raising the other straight over his head. When the ball popped in his mitt, he slapped his hands together in front of his grinning face. He was gawkily storkish, and very consistent.

I thought: This boy knows nothing of the yips. He will be forever in the world’s childhood. If only I could play as purely and single-mindedly as he does.

But doubt nagged: Does he really play unknowingly? And even if he does—did he really ever have a choice?

I could’ve asked. He was right there.

But what if an Amish boy also felt turned around, overwhelmed, scared, like he was trapped in a place many times too big for him, where his only recourse was to run from person to person and place to place to see if anything bore any relation to him, or if it might not help him get to where he thought he should be, wanting to cry but trying hard not to, wishing most of all he was in a warm, small, familiar place?

We played pepper in silence. On the other diamond, the roars of the Amish were less frequent but more intense, the sound of faith unstoppered. I tried hard not to fuck up. I thought of not throwing behind the batter, and then did, more times than I’d like. I envisioned my dad’s face, and remembered a time when each muffed ball would inflate my anxiety a little
bit further, like breaths into a blown gum bubble. The other boys handled the field with an uneventfulness that resembled meditation.

Right down the street from the Amtrak station, in the husked industrial half of Lancaster City, there was a minor league baseball stadium with
GAME DAY
signs in the parking lot. I decided to catch a few innings while I waited for my train.

I got a seat behind home plate for twelve bucks. A team from Long Island was visiting the Lancaster Barnstormers, whose logo is a cock-topped weather vane. Around the stadium, there was all this stuff to do other than watch baseball—merry-go-round, inflatable slide, pit barbecue, dunk tank—and all these families doing it. Maybe people will always at least
go
to the games. They can be like a historical farm, a nice-day alternative to taking your family to the Air and Space Museum and not reading any of the placards.

A small-bore sun setting in the west made the clouds glow along their margins. At the end of the first, I spotted three traditionally dressed Amish teens in my section and decamped for the seats behind them.

The boys were in Rumspringa. We talked about the schoolhouse shooting, how the Amish set up a charitable fund for the killer’s family, attended his funeral, and comforted his widow and parents, one man holding the killer’s sobbing father in his arms for an hour. The boys quieted down whenever the pitcher began to toe his rubber. The fielders held up as many fingers as outs, the repetition to make sure that the appropriate thought was firmly in mind at the appropriate moment. “His name was Charles Carl Roberts IV,” one of them said during a time-out.

The Barnstormers’ in-house MC trawled the rows around us for between-innings tricycle-race volunteers. The Amish kid
sitting in the middle wanted to know if I’d been to college. I told him I had. He stared at the alluvial veins on the backs of his hands. I blurted out: “No, but you’re lucky, though. School till eighth grade, then labor?” I got a little agitated, actually. Restricted consciousness? Making a
choice
to be protected from the burden of
choice
? Did they not know how blessed they were?

The one on the left said, “You could join, y’know.”

I daydreamed on it for a whole inning: sweatily carpentering, whispering to horses, sniffing handfuls of crumbly manure late in the day—whatever it is you do on a farm. And never knowing what else I might have become. How does that sound? Choosing to live a life buffered by a freedom found not in options but in the diminution of self? Having faith that peace of mind will become one day possible and then effortless after that? I lost track of balls and strikes. The clouds burned out on the last day of summer.

I said no. I said no, and I relished it. I relished it almost as much as I relish getting obstreperously bent around new people, or declining second dates.

All the time I was in Lancaster, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this other group of votaries I’d come across in my research. They, too, cherished their separateness. They, however, took up arms against the world to maintain it.

In
A.D
. 72, fifteen thousand Romans laid siege to the Jewish city of Masada, a lofty, isolated, and seemingly impregnable citadel built atop a table mountain. For a year, 960 men, women, and children manned its defense. Stymied at first, the Roman legion moved thousands of tons of earth and stone in constructing a monumental ramp and battering ram. When they finally breached Masada, they discovered that the fortress was uninhabited. Desolate.

Littering its streets were the cutthroat bodies of every man, woman, and child. Their religion forbade suicide, so the
defenders had drawn lots and killed one another in turn. The last man standing was the only one condemned. But before taking his life, he set fire to the city, burning every last thing to the ground. Everything but the granaries, the storerooms. He wanted the Romans to understand—they had chosen death over surrender.

That man. I imagine the Romans finding him slumped against a rear ruin, the brim of his helmet tipped back, as if the last thing he decided to do before damning himself with his own hand was wipe it across his forehead.

I asked the teens, “Hey, you guys didn’t happen to be at this softball game the other night?” They nodded at one another. I told them I left a little early and wanted to know who came out on top.

“Oh,” said the middle Amish. “The English went on a tear. They mercy-ruled our boys in the seventh.”

For years, Dad has made allusions to some mythical family tree. A Russell Codex, bound maybe in skin, that was compiled by his own father over the course of his life.

Dad went through it once and declared it off-limits. “Reparations, man,” was his reasoning. Yesterday, I asked to see it.

“This is not any attempt to research your Great American Novel, is it?” Dad wondered. “Spoiler alert: a group of shitbirds merged with a newer group of shitbirds.”

“Look,” I said. “Even if they
were
fieldmasters, and even if we
remain
peckerwood, I’d still like to know the stock whence I sprang.”

“Little did you know, I’ve already ordered and received your DNA analysis. You are: sixteen percent deported criminals, seventy-nine percent carnival workers, two percent defrocked priests, one percent female midget wrestlers, and, as you suspected, two percent circus animals. And that’s not even counting your mother’s side of the family. Don’t you listen to them when they say they’re Italian and Russian. They’re some escaped, unprosecuted Nazi prison guards, is what they are.”

“Nice math. Just gimme the fucking thing.”

“You’re gonna make fun of it.”

“Why? Why would I make fun of it?”

“Because you make fun of shit. That’s what you do. These were regular, hard-working Americans. Ignorant though they may have been.”

“I’m not gonna.”

“If you make fun of them, I will give them permission to haunt you.
I
will haunt you. On you like white on rice, my ghost.”

The Codex, it turned out, was in an accordioned file folder. Dad took a sheaf of onionskins out of it, held on to them several beats too long, risked a tear before finally letting go.

According to the documents, the first of us came to Maryland from Yorkshire in 1650. He started several tobacco plantations, adopted the motto
Patientia et Perseverentia.
Many years later, his great-great-grandson, “a strong-minded man, unmovable when he had formed his opinions,” “a devout Methodist in religion” who had “no fear of anything or anyone”—this man fought for American independence. Then he went home and freed his slaves.

After that, he ventured with the family into Ohio, back when the place was a hinterland full of pissed-off Indians. Russells built the first schoolhouse and church in a town called St. Clairsville. There they settled, and multiplied.

At first, our men did one of three things: they preached, taught school, or soldiered. As time passed, they did only things two and three. Then mostly three. Pasty white Americans, the lot of them. Men with broad faces and sharp thoughts. Chaw-browned teeth, reliable sidearms, baaaad dispositions. They were involved in most minor and all major military conflicts. Fought on both sides of the Mason-Dixon. Did harm for country and kin.

Reading about them, I felt … what? Not pride, exactly.

Eh, pride.

But actually: more like a felt lack. Like something should be in me, but isn’t. Has been lopped off, in fact, and tingles like a phantom limb.

This phantom-limb feeling haunts my body
and
my mind. In my body, it’s diffuse, like the dark applause of bats leaving a cave. In my mind, it’s this Cheshire grin floating in a void. Altogether, it’s me wishing,
wishing
a motherfucker would.

As to whether this feeling causes me to fantasize about justifiable homicide—or vice versa, that it’s fantasizing about justifiable homicide that dredges the feeling: I don’t know. I
do
know that I do a lot of brooding. Mostly about the day when I can finally put some loved ones behind me like so many eggs in one basket. When I can absorb all the blows meant for them, or else distribute some on their behalf. When I can finally, thank
God,
expend myself in a violence of kindness.

Late at night, when I’m in bed or watching a West Coast hockey game, I think about what that must feel like. Taking the shortcut between flesh and spirit. Regifting my unwanted self like a breadmaker. I bet it feels good. The way a log in a fire looks like it feels good.

It has given over to its physical fact. It has learned that there is indeed a best way to go out.

I know I should be pleased if not proud of how I have handled myself of late. Despite a strong youthful predisposition, I haven’t had a fistfight in more than a decade, when me and my opponent were built like uncooked hot dogs. I should be fine with the fact that I let my battles slide, or else let someone else fight them for me. When confronted, I use my words. It’s enlightened! I know that the principles of white American masculinity are atavistic. Invidious. Really, they enforce a paring down, a closing off—not a reaching for but a turning in. A kind of spiritual fist-making.

I know all of this, and should be fine with it, but I absolutely am not. Such is why a boy is infinitely more dangerous than a man. He’s so sensitive about the perception of his courage.

Those later Russells who felt likewise had four choices, according to the Codex. They could learn a trade, join the army, go to sea, or take advantage of the land and labor opportunities out west. A goodly number of them left St. Clairsville to chase the vanishing frontier. Dad’s dad stayed. Papa Lou went to Ohio University but worked as a flagman during the Depression. He taught school after that, and then he fought in the Pacific Theater. He came back with a respiratory condition.

This being the era in which doctors thought there was something to recommend about Florida’s fartgas atmosphere, Papa Lou took his two boys and started a breakaway sect of Russells on the Gulf Coast. Baby boy Kent did not make the trip. He had by then been lost to a routine tonsillectomy. The anesthesiologist gave him too much ether, fever-dreamed him to death. Dad’s aunt Didi was supposed to be the attending specialist, but she couldn’t work the surgery because of the conflict of interest. Kent was put in the care of a stranger, and he died.